Friday, August 30, 2013

The following reviews ran in
the Waterloo Record and the Guelph Mercury, mostly while I spent my summer
vacation listening to old records.

Braids – Flourish/Perish
(Flemish Eye)

Braids, the Polaris Prize
shortlisted oddballs of 2011, were never much of a rock band to begin with. So
the fact they’ve ditched all their guitars for their second album isn’t that
much of a surprise; nor is the fact that it sounds like a busier version of
Blue Hawaii, a side project for singer Raphaelle
Standell-Preston that released an excellent album earlier this year. That all
four members of Braids are intelligent, delicate and daring musicians is
without question; whether it all adds up to something is something else
entirely. Even eggheads like Bjork and Radiohead, whose b-sides Braids no doubt
grew up studying, are prone to visceral pleasures. Braids, on the other hand,
inspire not just chin-scratching but more than a bit of head-scratching.

Braids were born in Calgary and
moved to Montreal, a city seemingly much more in tune with their love of
abstraction, synths and the avant-garde. However, Flourish/Perish sounds like
they took their lessons learned in Canada’s artistic capital and went back to
Canada’s newest financial capital, where the buildings are newer, the suburbs
are endless and it’s easy to feel rootless. Flourish/Perish works best when
suspended in time, commuting to work, its layers of beauty without cohesion
perfect for illustrating in-between states.

It doesn’t help, however, that
the album’s best three songs are sequenced last; maybe they’re trying to make
some point about rewarding patience, but until the final stretch here Braids
gains respect while offering little to love.(Aug. 29)

Download: “Juniper,” “In Kind,”
“Hossak”

Dustin Bentall and the Smokes –
You Are an Island (Aporia)

Bentall may have started out as
a rootsy troubadour—and he still regularly employs fiddle and mandolin—but by
employing Limblifter’s Ryan Dahle as producer for this third album, he adds
fuzz bass, “Lust For Life” drums and much more bounce in his step. His
right-hand man, Del Cowsill (son of Billy, of ’60s group the Cowsills),
provides solid lead guitar and harmonies, while fiddler Kendel Carson (also of
Belle Starr) proves to be invaluable. Somewhere between Blue Rodeo and Yukon
Blonde—and nowhere near the shadow of his father, Barney—Dustin Bentall is an
island waiting to be discovered. (Aug. 29)

Download: “Shine,” “Oxford
Street,” “Pretty Good Life”

Dictaphone – Poems from a
Rooftop (Sonic Pieces)

A Berlin trio featuring
electronics, bass guitar, woodwinds and a violin, Dictaphone play noir jazz
slowly being unspooled and dissected. This band took six years to follow up
their last record, and everything here sounds like a band that likes to take
its time. Tempos are uniformly languid; the violin and clarinet pop, hop and
swoon around the glitchy electronics while a jazzy, dubby rhythm percolates
underneath. The electroacoustic blend sounds more mid-2000s Montreal than 2013
Berlin, like a Mitchell Akiyama remix of Bell Orchestre—though ultimately,
Dictaphone sound entirely out of time and place and in their own smoky, shadowy
world. (Aug. 1)

Download: “Rattle,” “The
Conversation,” “Maelbeek”

Ebony Bones – Behold, a Pale
Horse (1984 Records)

Did you ever lament that Grace
Jones and Kate Bush never made an album together in their prime?

This oddball Brit opens her
second album with what sounds like a Bulgarian choir and (what is credited as)
the Symphony Orchestra of India performing over pulsing tom drums; the next
track appears to stutter and loop a sample of the first song, bring in a
British children’s choir and what could be a skipping-rope-rhyme rhythm. (The
choir later returns to sing a Smiths cover.) Only by the third track, five
minutes in, does a pop song emerge, one that swaggers like Janelle Monae and
Santigold and sounds like a particularly sinister James Bond theme written by
The Cure’s Robert Smith.

Little has been written about
Ms. Bones on this side of the ocean, other than that she’s toured with kindred
spirit Cee-Lo Green. But even in a world of modern iconoclasts like Lady Gaga
and Nicki Minaj, Ebony Bones cuts her own path, embracing over-the-top bombast
(and visual outrageousness—she looks like Macy Gray with makeup by Bjork and
outfits by Dr. Seuss) while, unlike anyone else currently operating at this
scale, also capable of dialling it all back to create something majestic and
monumental out of the most minimal of elements. For Bones, one dares to say, a
skeletal structure is all she needs. As a result, the album—indeed, even
individual tracks—ebb and flow with dynamics that display the full range of her
vocals and her arrangements. Bones goes out on a limb on every track here,
which, if it proves successful, could make her the most outré pop star since
Bjork. (Aug. 8)

Download: “I See I Say,” “Neu
World Blues,” “Breathe”

Eons - Arctic Radio
(Headless Owl)

The raucous Toronto
prog-folk choir Bruce Peninsula has been a magnet for some of the city’s finest
musicians: Austra, Snowblink, Ohbijou and more, including playwright/short-story
writer Misha Bower. Here, Bower and BP’s Matt Cully—who normally plays second
banana to BP frontman Neil Haverty—step out with this duo, playing haunting
acoustic music with rich harmonies, weeping pedal steel and rich lyrical
imagery. The title is evocative: this music does indeed sound like it was made
communally by the population of a small, remote hamlet, surrounded by a vast
expanse, broadcasting to unknown sympathetic ears.

Download: “Brothers
and Sisters,” “Martial Law,” “Arctic Radio”

Jaron Freeman-Fox -
The Opposite of Everything (independent)

The late, great
boundary-pushing violinist Oliver Schroer is no longer with us. Ashley MacIsaac
went right off his rocker long ago. And so here comes shit-hot fiddle fiend
Freeman-Fox (who indeed was mentored by Schroer) to extract smoke from his bow
while tearing through genres from Yiddish, Irish, Acadian, Roma and ragtime to
anything else he finds in his travels, including various shades of jazz and
prog rock—and even some Mongolian throat singing for good measure. Only a
bluesy take on the Doors’ “People Are Strange” falls flat.

Freeman-Fox might
well be just another astonishingly gifted madman were it not for the
sympathetic players he surrounds himself with, starting with producer David
Travers-Smith, but particularly drummer Dan Stadnicki and clarinetist John
Williams (Boxcar Boys, Lemon Bucket Orchestra). Without them, Freeman-Fox might
come across as a brilliant dilettante; together, they can slay any band,
anywhere, anytime. (Aug. 8)

Download: “Burnin’ Sun,” “The
Rabid Rabbi,” “Stray Camino”

Daughn Gibson – Me Moan (Sub Pop)

There are many
things to admire about Daughn Gibson’s second album (his first for Sub Pop).
One of them is the baritone’s incredibly frustrating ability to sing with
marbles in his mouth, not to mention holding long notes on the R sound rather
than vowels—even drawling out even words like “me” and “you” to sound like they
end in R.

That drawl—as well
as the prevalence of slide guitar and rockabilly reverb—has caused some to slot
Gibson as a post-modern roots-rock revisionist. And sure, a song like “Kissin
on the Blacktop” comes off like Randy Travis as produced by Trent Reznor. Much
of the time, Me Moan sounds like a Wall of Voodoo 45 played at 33 speed.

No matter. The
uniqueness of Gibson’s sound overcomes his odd voice, with sonic signifiers of
an America rapidly receding into a rust belt—Gibson lives in a small town
outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—mixed with synth strings, sound effects, keyboard
bass and, um, bagpipes.

Surrealist filmmaker
David Lynch just put out his second album; after surviving his debut, I can’t
fathom the idea of listening to his new one. And why would I, when Daughn
Gibson easily scratches the itch for Americana that combines the slick and the
sweet with the strange, seamy underbelly. (Aug. 15)

Download: “Mad Ocean,” “The
Pisgee Nest,” “Won’t You Climb”

Gogol Bordello – Pura Vida
Conspiracy (ATO)

Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz is
not ashamed to take credit for North America’s interest in Slavic and Roma
culture in the last decade. Indeed, his New York-based brand of “gypsy punk”
did usher accordions and fiddles and pave the way for Beirut, Devotchka and
other acts who filled large clubs and theatres with audiences eager to embrace
music from former Soviet socialist republics. While Hutz was always a visionary
and an exuberant performer, was Gogol Bordello ever much more than a
carnival-esque spectacle?

Hutz opens his sixth album with
“We Rise Again,” as stirring an anthem as he’s ever written, punctuated by a
bold brass section. The next track, “Dig Deep Enough,” combines the
mandolin-drenched eastern melancholy with two-step punk and a boozy barroom
chorus, making it a perfect distillation of everything this band has ever
excelled at. After that, Hutz’s cartoonish side takes over—as it often
does—and, as a guy now on the other side of 40, it doesn’t suit him well. You
know the scuzzy old guys who reunite to play Warped Tour and act like they’re
still 20 years old? If he wasn’t lugging accordions and violins around with
him, Hutz could well be that guy. (Aug. 8)

Download: “We Rise Again,” “Dig
Deep Enough,” “Amen”

Kiki Gyan – 24 Hours in a Disco
1978-82 (Soundway)

African disco—makes perfect
sense. Just as disco was taking over the Western world in the’70s, Fela Kuti
was developing the long, hypnotic, repetitive rhythms of Afrobeat.
Occasionally, the two styles overlapped; there’s an excellent compilation of
Nigerian disco that came out a couple of years ago. But for Ghanaian
keyboardist Kiki Gyan, he was all disco, all the time—and this collection
proves that he deserves to be considered one of the best. And during the summer
of 2013, when Chic’s Nile Rogers can be heard all over the smash hit album by
Daft Punk, it sounds even better.

Gyan was an in-demand session
player who served a stint in one of the first successful African bands in
Britain, Osibisa, before leaving to cut these disco tracks, full of his rich
falsetto, popping bass and staccato rhythm guitar. “Sexy Dancer” takes a
clavinet riff not unlike Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and stretches it into a
seven-minute disco-funk workout; “24 Hours in a Disco” features the punchiest
string section you’ve heard since the orchestral version of Beethoven’s fifth
from Saturday Night Fever.

Gyan succumbed to hard drugs
and died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2004—just shortly before so many
incredible, obscure African recordings started being reissued. That’s a
tragedy. But the greater tragedy would be for these joyous, vibrant records to
be lost in history. (Aug. 8)

Download: “24 Hours in a Disco,”
“Disco Dancer,” “Sexy Dancer”

Helado Negro –
Invisible Life (Asthmatic Kitty)

Roberto Lange might have been
raised in southern Florida by Ecuadorian immigrant parents, and he may have
lived in Savannah, Georgia, before relocating to Brooklyn, but everything about
his lazy, hazy and trippy third album as Helado Negro sounds like it was beamed
in from another galaxy. He sings largely in Spanish and there are rhythms from
Brazilian tropicalia, dub reggae and Berlin minimalist techno, but it mostly
seems like Lange left his record collection in the sun too long, and then
started loading it all onto his sampler while smoking a big spliff. Rarely does
an album this discombobulated sound so sparse and lovely. Out of time, out of
place, and seemingly from outer space. (Aug.
15)

Download: “Illumina Vos,” “Lentamente,”
“Junes”

Jenny Hval – Innocence is Kinky
(Rune Grammofon)

While listening to the intriguing
and often astounding sound worlds created by Norwegian singer Jenny Hval, one
can imagine the conversations she might have had with producer (and long-time
PJ Harvey collaborator) John Parish. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of them
comprises the brief track “Give Me That Sound.” Amidst a squall of feedback,
white noise and intermittent percussion, she intones, “I have a mouth and I
want to sing like a face that is slit open / I want to sing like a continuous
echo of splitting hymens.”

All right, then. Hval is no
mere provocateur, however. She’s a novelist and performance artist who can also
do incredible things with her elastic voice, bending her pitch
conversationally, turning a frayed screech into a melody, or holding a
sustained, quiet note to uncomfortable lengths, at once vulnerable and
determined. Parish darts and stabs around her melodies with jagged guitar and
evocative soundscapes; he’s the perfect sounding board, illuminating her often
opaque lyrical and musical ideas. Together, they’ve made a daring album, one
that—compared to say, the new album by The Knife—goes to the limit of
avant-garde songcraft without falling right off the edge. (Aug. 1)

Colombian-Canadian
guitarist Roberto Lopez notes that the year he moved to Montreal to study
music, 1994, was the same year that marked the death of a Colombian musical
legend, Lucho Bermudez, a man described as the Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington
of his country. With that in mind, Lopez likewise combines American big-band
orchestration with Colombian rhythms, his four-piece horn section led primarily
by clarinetist Jean-Sebastien Leblanc. Lopez is a strong rhythm player and
soloist, but he’s no showboater; instead, his eponymous band is primarily a
vehicle for his skills as an arranger and bandleader. He’s the only South
American in this group, but he’s found a fine group of players who find the
southern swing with ease. (Aug. 15)

Download: “Fiesta de
Negritos,” “Blue Vallenato,” “Tres Clarinettes”

Sarah Neufeld – Hero
Brother (Constellation)

What to expect from
a solo violin record? Moreover, what to expect from a member of Arcade Fire and
the partner of Colin Stetson, whose solo saxophone albums and performances are
not only bringing avant-garde music closer to the mainstream, but are feats of
physical strength?

For anyone who knows
Neufeld’s work in Bell Orchestre, a group she formed with Richard Reed Parry
before either of them joined Arcade Fire, Hero Brother unfolds exactly as you
suspect it might: haunting, droning melodies that unfold through pulsing
rhythms that feel more like lapping ocean waves than beats (the only actual
percussion here is Neufeld’s stomping foot on the title track). She owes debts
to Czech icon Iva Bittova and neighbours Godspeed You Black Emperor, but
Neufeld already has an immediately recognizable compositional sense, carried
through from Bell Orchestre. The production varies from capturing the intimate
tones of her instrument in a spacious room of reverb to what sound like field
recordings in underpasses. A melancholy and romantic record, Hero Brother
presents a naked Neufeld conquering the biggest challenge of an already
productive career: creating captivating atmosphere while standing on stage
alone. (Aug. 22)

Download: “Hero
Brother,” “Wrong Thought,” “Below”

Omar – The Man
(Shanachie)

This British soul
singer, who came of age in the late ’80s alongside Soul II Soul and predated
the U.S. neo-soul movement of D’Angelo, Maxwell and Erykah Badu, was recently
appointed to the Order of the British Empire for his musical contributions. And
on this, his first album in seven years, he sounds like the elder soul statesman
he is, the kind of guy for whom Stevie Wonder wants to write songs (he has).

Omar tries on all
kinds of clothes here, from songs that seem to have sprung directly from
Wonder’s mid-’70s albums to jazzier arrangements to New Orleans groove to folkie
soul to the funkiest song you’ve ever heard revolving around a bass clarinet.
He even redoes his first single, “There’s Nothing Like This,” giving it a
slinkier Bill Withers-esque makeover, featuring D’Angelo bassist Pino
Palladino. Despite some vintage sounds, however, he’s not a retro act: there
are bubbling electronics and passages that wouldn’t be out of place on an album
by Frank Ocean—who could learn a few lessons from a guy who rightfully calls
himself The Man. (Aug. 22)

Download: “I Love
Being With You,” “I Can Listen,” “The Man”

OMD – English Electric (BMG)

Listening to this new OMD
album, Kraftwerk immediately springs to mind. The two acts were not exactly
contemporaries—Kraftwerk were the pioneers of synth pop in the early ’70s, while
OMD didn’t show up until 1978, the year of Kraftwerk’s biggest pop album, Man
Machine. OMD were less experimental and, eventually, much more
mainstream—complete with strings and sax solos, culminating in their massive
hit from Pretty in Pink, “If You Leave.” In 1990, the original duo behind OMD
broke up for 15 years, eventually reuniting for a few gigs and now releasing
the second album of their comeback. Kraftwerk, on the other hand, claimed to
still be together, despite a fluctuating lineup and only one album of new
material in the last 25 years.

English Electric owes more to
Kraftwerk than OMD’s mainstream period, or certainly anything resembling
contemporary music. Such is the throwback that not only are the synths (or
comparable plug-ins) ancient, but many lyrics appear to have been written 40
years ago, when technology was still exotic and dazzling—not ubiquitous and
dull.

Once you get over how archaic
and strange this new OMD record is—and a few total clunkers (“Atomic Ranch,” “Helen
of Troy”)—English Electric finds both Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey in fine
voice and capable of majestic pop hooks. There’s nothing here that wouldn’t
sound out of place on a 1982 album; that they seem frozen in time is both the
best and worst thing about this record. (Aug. 1)

Download: “Kissing the Machine,”
“Metroland,” “Dresden”

Pet Shop Boys –
Electric (X2)

The last time I
loved an album called Electric was 1987; it was by The Cult, who until then
were a hippie goth-rock band, suddenly transformed into a visceral,
ass-kicking—and frankly, more than a bit ridiculous—riff-rock saviours.

What does that have
to do with cerebral disco duo the Pet Shop Boys? After the second two-thirds of
their 30-year career produced a rather spotty, limp discography with only the
occasionally strong single or album (2006’s Fundamental stands out, but little
else), they’ve suddenly come back swinging with their own Electric: a muscular,
maximalist tour-de-force of pure, dumb pleasure that demands to be played at
full blast.

Except, of course,
that it’s not that dumb. Sure, the Eurotrance production is over the top, and
mastered to an obnoxious volume, making that last Lady Gaga album seem subtle.
But lyricist Neil Tennant is in fine form, in fact never better than when he
writes the best Stephin Merritt song of the last 10 years, “Love is a Bourgeois
Construct”—in which the narrator eschews roses, fidelity and romance in favour
of thumbing through his old Marxist texts, before finally delivering the
punchline: “I’m giving up the bourgeoisie / Until you come back to me.”
Tennant, the bone-dry robot who once transformed Willie Nelson’s “Always on My
Mind” into a techno anthem, pulls off a similar miracle here, recasting Bruce
Springsteen’s 2007 Iraq War-era song “The Last to Die (For a Mistake)” on the
dance floor.

Do two guys pushing
60 still go to dance clubs? Sure seems like it, judging by the sound they
achieve here with Stuart Price, the British producer who also gave Madonna her
only good album of the last 15 years (Confessions from a Dance Floor). While
there are elements of the evolving electronic sounds the Pet Shop Boys have
always drawn from, they’re not going retro: tracks like “Shouting in the
Evening” could easily be dropped into a set with Skrillex or Deadmau5. These
guys are not going to dance gently into the good night. (Aug. 15)

Download: “Love is a
Bourgeois Construct,” “Inside a Dream,” “The Last to Die”

Rodion G.A. – The Lost Tapes
(Strut)

Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been
seduced by Ethiopian jazz and ’60s Cambodian pop and Peruvian psychedelia and
Indian ragas on Moog synthesizers and god knows what else from every corner of
the Earth. But surely no one saw this gem coming: futuristic synth home
recordings from Romania in the late ’70s, from a band that only ever released
two songs on a local compilation in 1981, despite being a popular live act from
1975 to 1987.

Primarily the work of one man, Rodion Ladislau Roșca, and his
tape machines, Rodion G.A. sounds like
the Cold War relic it is: spooky, ominous and alien, using DIY technology of
the time (effects created with reel-to-reel tape machines, homemade amplifiers)
that was technologically advanced for the time yet entirely tangible and
fragile. It’s comparable, of course, to German electronic music of the same
time period (captured on two invaluable compilations recently assembled by Soul
Jazz Records, the second of which came out in 2012, both called Deutsche Elektronische Musik). But Rodion G.A. is much more
primitive, raw and downright weird, not so much hippies exploring avant-garde
music and ambient sounds, as in Germany, but more like acid burnouts and
proto-punks trying to retain a semblance of sanity under one of the most brutal
Communist regimes of the time period.

Despite the lack of officially
released recordings, Rodion G.A. did have some success, with appearances on
national television (including a New Year’s Eve gig) and scores for a ballet at
the national opera company, as well as the soundtrack to an animated film. Only
an artist from behind the Iron Curtain could boast having a sentence like this
in his record company bio: “Scores for
gymnastic routines also helped provide some income.” As the regime became even harsher
in the mid-’80s, however, gigs dried up and Rodion walked
away from music two years before the Berlin Wall fell. He became a labourer in
London in the ’90s, before returning to Bucharest to work servicing sound
equipment.

After his music was
rediscovered recently, Rodion G.A. played an acclaimed, sold-out comeback show
in Bucharest with a full European tour this summer. But as he told one
interviewer just before this compilation came out, getting his due now is
bittersweet. "It hurts me because it's too
late,” he said. “Even if I became a millionaire now, it will be too late. It's
too late, my life was destroyed." (Aug. 29)

Download: “Diagonala,” “Caravane,”
“Imagini Din Vis”

Kinnie Starr – Kiss
It (Aporia)

One never knows what
to expect from Kinnie Starr, who’s been a hip-hop MC, a spoken-word poet, a
grungy guitar-slinger and sensual folk artist. But an album like Kiss It is
definitely not what I expected from this 42-year-old artist. Her seventh album
sounds like a Peaches-style reinvention: an older woman alone with minimal
technology and making sexually charged, primitive pop music—though less raunchy
and less successful. The amateurish approach from this charismatic veteran has
its charms—especially on a playful and prescriptive ode to cunnilingus with the
chorus “kiss it all around before you go downtown.” But more than a few times,
especially on the uncharacteristically juvenile “We Just Want to Play” or “We
Should Go Back,” Starr sounds like a 17-year-old kid in her bedroom trying on a
pose. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis. (Aug. 22)

Download: “Body Like
a Queen,” “Kiss It,” “Go Go See It”

Superchunk – I Hate
Music (Merge)

When once-great punk
bands reunite, the audience wants them to sound fossilized, almost exactly the
way they remember them 25 years ago or more. It doesn’t matter if said band
developed and matured during the first phase of their career, signing off with
a career highlight that combined their earliest enthusiasms with a more
tempered, adult refinement. In the case of Superchunk, that was their 2001
album Here’s to Shutting Up. When they returned nine years later—time spent
away nurturing their label, Merge, which birthed Arcade Fire and many more—they
came roaring back with the aptly titled Majestic Shredding.

Listening to their
new single, "Me & You & Jackie Mittoo" (a title that references a
Jamaican reggae legend, a long-time Toronto resident), it appears that all is
still well: enormous power chords, wailing guitar leads, and yelping
singer/guitarist Mac McCaughn opining, “I hate music / what is it worth / can’t
bring anyone back to this Earth.” It’s easily one of the best songs of
Superchunk’s extensive discography.

From there, however,
the well goes dry. The members, now in their early 40s, all have other
projects—musical and otherwise—that occupy their time, so there’s little
incentive to try and bring something new to Superchunk. If Majestic Shredding
showed there was still lots of pent-up punch in their pogo, I Hate Music has
all the bluster and chops but little of the same urgency. One of the best pop
hooks on the album (FOH) is set to lyrics about, um, sound check—surely, and
sadly, a sign that someone’s running out of steam.(Aug. 22)

Download: “Me &
You & Jackie Mittoo,” “FOH,” “Low F”

Tricky – False Idols (!K7)

The last time British trip-hop
pioneer Tricky made headlines in this country was 2010, when his tour bus was
stranded off the 402 near Sarnia in a huge snowstorm. A local farmer saw the
tour bus stuck on the road and invited the whole crew in for dinner. They’d
never heard of Tricky. He told them he was a performer. They asked him to sing
some Christmas carols. He said he didn’t know any.

Who knows what effect that had
on the notoriously crusty producer, who at that point in time was coasting on a
long-faded rep after once being hailed as the future of British music. But
after admitting that his recent albums weren’t really that good, he’s coming
out swinging while promoting False Idols, claiming that it’s his best album
since his 1995 debut, Maxinquaye. He’s right. And part of the reason is that
he’s written some songs he could sing on piano for Ontario farmers, should the
occasion ever arise again.

Despite an unusual supply of
melodies, False Idols is not the sound of a shadowy man suddenly embracing
sunlight. It is every bit as murky, mysterious and occasionally downright
creepy as Tricky’s finest work, which he seems prepared to accept as what he
does best. His path in the last decade has been varied, but rarely rewarding.
The burden of being acclaimed as an innovator is that no one wants to hear you
evolve once your debut ends up defining an entire genre. (Portishead managed to
avoid this by taking 11 years between their second and third records.) For
this, his first album on his own label, he put aside any external pressure and
recorded the whole thing in two weeks; hence, it’s sparse and natural, both in
its beauty and its darker tensions. For an artist who’s tried so long to break
out of a pigeonhole, Tricky is most productive just being himself. (Aug. 1)